Blog Feed - Tim Jarvis

Portfolio Perfection

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 20:32:00 GMT

For most of us the days of creating our own portfolios from scratch are way behind us now (except if you’re a developer), so make life as easy as possible for yourself by using portfolio builders, creative services and platforms that are designed for creatives exactly like you.

I recently put together this two-part guide to walk you through preparing a portfolio for a new job. In the second part it’s time to tell the story of your illustrious career, but more importantly, it’s about keeping the new chapters coming.

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How to create the perfect online portfolio on Medium

This portfolio builds itself

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 10:23:00 GMT

We love Vimeo, and so does the Fabrik community. In fact, almost all of our filmmakers have Vimeo content in their portfolios. That's a lot of film!

One of the biggest challenges faced by creatives wanting to promote their work online is simply finding the time to do it. How many times have you been in search of that free evening or weekend to "update my site"?

The good news for Vimeo users is that time is no longer a prerequisite of showcasing your wonderful creations. Today we launched an improved integration with Vimeo making Fabrik the quickest and easiest way to promote your Vimeo content online.

Check out the video above to see how easy it is to add your Vimeo content to Fabrik. Create your online portfolio in minutes - no cutting, cropping or uploading required.

Now your evenings and weekends really are your own.

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More over at Fabrik

Fabrik goes live

Sat, 02 May 2015 14:56:00 GMT

This journey began fifteen months ago, and the first chapter is now complete. It took a while, but this is roughly what happened:

Back in the summer of 2013 I had a problem at Profission; how to deal with small clients who were unable to afford a completely bespoke build for their digital properties. Unsatisfied with the experience of using existing website builders to put together truly well-performing brochure and portfolio sites for friends, I split Profission’s productive output in two (or as I like to put it, took everything off Phil's plate), closed the books on new business and set out to build a brand new portfolio builder with an editorial bias.

Dogma was focussed on allowing creatives to build stories, or case studies. A closed beta invitation was opened to a handful of creatives to give us the input we needed to make the right product and CMS. Phil and Ben were in constant communication over this period, and Dogma’s data structure became loosely based on Ben’s concepts for Fabrik. Dogma’s closed beta ran for six months and produced four portfolio sites on a very early-stage multi-tenant platform. At the end of that stage Phil and I understood the demands, but more importantly realised how difficult it was going to be to achieve it all from scratch.

While Phil and I were slowly getting closer to killing each other building out Dogma’s functionality, Luke and Chris’s directorial career was really taking off and the duo were becoming increasingly in demand. With commitments in London and on location taking a huge toll on their time, they could no longer focus on Fabrik or service Bespoke. Ben was fast losing runway. One evening in March 2014 all five of us sat down together for the first time in Profission’s meeting room to put all their ideas on the table.

A few exchanges later a plan was hatched; Luke and Chris would step away from Fabrik, Phil and I would cease work on Dogma, take over the creative and front-end requirements of Fabrik and roll our plans and ideas for Dogma into Fabrik’s roadmap.

So, firstly I re-ignited Bespoke and Phil took over Fabrik’s support, which gave us some invaluable insight into running the product and working with London’s film industry. Over the next six months I used Profission's contracted workload to provide a runway for Fabrik, cut the agency’s costs and gave notice on the office. Ben continued to advance Fabrik’s API and core infrastructure. In November the new Fabrik team moved from Regent Street to Old Street to become part of London’s Tech City.

During autumn and winter concepts were created for a third version of Fabrik with a focus on expanding the community around Fabrik, and building the foundations of a Dashboard and UI that could be expanded to support the ideas the guys had on their roadmap. Bespoke launched new sites for Camp David, Bare and Park Village.

January saw Ben, Phil and I working on a major update to the Fabrik product and it’s API, the completion of which took just three months; a major testament to the new team. With a fresh brand and website, the community behind Fabrik was brought to the front of the platform in the form of Fabrik Heroes - the first step in an ongoing effort to showcase and support the creative talent using Fabrik. Now recognised by creative professionals and agencies worldwide, Bespoke continued with new sites for production companies in London and in LA.

Following a soft-launch in April, and full launch in May, Fabrik is in great shape with a passionate and dedicated team, and an incredibly exciting roadmap ahead.

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More on Fabrik

Behind The Sun

Thu, 08 Jan 2015 19:53:00 GMT

Summer accessories 2014 story for Australian publication Fashion Journal. Photography: Drew Wheeler, styling: Cecile Huynh, hair & makeup: Sylvia Ura, graphic treament: Tim Jarvis, model: Tess @ Mavericks.

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View the full editorial

Most Astonishing

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 19:37:00 GMT

A fashion story that explores suggestion in colour. The mind subconsciously invents colour information from monochrome photography - whilst you can't see the colours you can imagine them with great accuracy.

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View the full editorial

Fractured Series Prints

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 14:49:00 GMT

I am very excited to announce a series of four limited edition art prints of recent Magnasoma pieces. Signed and numbered in editions of 25 or 30 these C-Type photographic prints are spectacularly produced on a range of metallic, gloss and matt archival papers and printed by The Printspace in London.

Archival Quality Prints
All Magnasoma prints are limited-run, high resolution productions using a professional grade archival C-type process. Digital C-types are real photographic prints, created on light sensitive professional photographic paper using a finely balanced red, green & blue light source. The Printspace is a trusted, professional print studio using state-of-the-art equipment and the latest print and colour-management processes.

Archival life expectancy: 40 years in daylight, 80 years in dark storage.

Fuji Crystal Gloss
Professional colour paper from the Fuji Crystal Archive range with a gloss finish, which accentuates the colour to give a punchy, rich feel.

Fuji Crystal Matt
Fuji Crystal Archive paper with a semi-matt finish. The paper is coated with a slightly stippled finish and gives a very natural photographic finish with subtle colour.

Kodak Metallic
Kodak Metallic has a rich metallic base. The colours have a reflective, metallic and 3-dimensional feel to them.

Shipping

Prints are packaged in a protective, sealed cardboard parcel tube.

All orders are shipped via Royal Mail in the UK and Parcelforce Worldwide. Please allow a week or so for shipping, although items are usually shipped as soon as possible. Pleasecontact me with any questions or concerns.

Mixed Medley

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 15:33:00 GMT

Editorial layout for Hope St Magazine story Mixed Medley. Design & Layout: Tim Jarvis, photography: Drew Wheeler, styling: Issie Gibbons, model: Izzy @ Premier, hair: Piera Berdicchia, makeup: Poppy France.

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View the full editorial

Magnasoma Archive

Thu, 04 Jul 2013 15:20:00 GMT

The last update as part of the new site launch; a Tumblr archive of historical Magnasoma pieces collected from various places in the internet and my own archives.

Loosely arranged into separate series, work included in the historical editions of Magnasoma can be reached from links on the left of the feed.

Magnasoma Permanent Archive.

Anatomy of Story Poster

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:44:00 GMT

The Anatomy of Story is a masterclass in scriptwriting for film by screenwriter John Truby. This poster illustrates the five story arcs Truby described in the opening chapter of his book; likening them to processes and elements found in natural and man-made environments.

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View this project

Instagram 2012 Poster

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 15:39:00 GMT

The first of two A0 posters produced during spring 2013. This piece is a calendar grid view of 80ish of my most cherished Instagram uploads over 2012, each tagged with their location and arranged in date order.

Much to my surprise it turned out that the iPhone is actually pretty good at saving high-res versions of the imagery Instagram produces, with many of the shots saved as high as 2048×2048 pixels, making the prep for this piece a relatively simple operation. Indeed the most taxing part of the process was selecting the lucky contenders which are limited only by what I could reasonably fit onto a poster, which originally started at A1 before I gave in to a format with more freedom.

Images were tagged from the iPhone’s camera roll and added to Dropbox, downloaded then processed through Photoshop into 450dpi CMYK EPS files. The poster artwork was created in InDesign. The poster was printed by large-format printers Onward Display in London.

My Instagram feed.

Learning to curate

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:48:00 GMT

The way creatives learn and develop their skill has changed; coffee-table design books are dead and increasingly the resources designers rely on are becoming digital and transient. As purely print-based periodicals like Grafik and ID close and have their shelf-space snapped up by small run high-fashion and lifestyle vanity publications those that wish to survive are adopting digital subscription models to survive; a very expensive undertaking and not one many publishers can afford.

In the midst of all of this creatives are nurturing their own digital resources to keep track of their inspiration, to understand trends and new directions in design. On the back of the success of platforms like Ffffound and Pinterest the contemporary creative is becoming organised.

Blogging platforms have given the creative individual a powerful tool to collect and share their interests and the work that inspires them, some of which boast audiences so vast that the traditional publishing model has become all but irrelevant. It is in this space that the blog owner becomes curator, and it is in this space that no single voice proclaims good or bad, but in which many small voices promote and share only what inspires them.

The role of the curator in communicating art and design is not entirely a recent one, but it is becoming increasingly important in the digital space:

“In many ways, curators took on the role of what we might have once thought of as a role of the critic,” said Tom Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. “Someone like Clement Greenberg was able to codify moments in art and promote individual artists into groups, and say, ‘This is what is significant in our time.’ I think there’s a moment in the ’80s when that transfers over to curators.”

Aaron Schuster summed up, “The image we have of the curator today: the curator-as-artist, a roaming, freelance designer of exhibitions, or in his own witty formulation, a ‘spiritual guest worker’… If artists since Marcel Duchamp have affirmed selection and arrangement as legitimate artistic strategies, was it not simply a matter of time before curatorial practice – itself defined by selection and arrangement – would come to be seen as an art that operates on the field of art itself?”

On curating.info Katerina Gkoutziouli reviews Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media, by Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook.

“The art space itself has extended and so has curatorial practice. Which brings us to the question of what the role of the curator is in a distributed networking condition? And how have the variable manifestations of space redefined curatorial decisions? The authors set out to explore not only how significant the space is for art but also how art can be transmitted and communicated in different contexts. ‘When the work is immaterial – framed and understood only through participation in the system itself – then the network of its distribution is highlighted’.”

The foreword to the book includes the following:

“As curator Steve Dietz has observed, new media art is like contemporary art–but different. New media art involves interactivity, networks, and computation and is often about process rather than objects. New media artworks, difficult to classify according to the traditional art museum categories determined by medium, geography, and chronology, present the curator with novel challenges involving interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination.”

Expanding my knowledge and understanding of the creative disciplines, how they shift and evolve has become increasingly important to me. It is no longer enough for me to simply create and produce work blind, but to do so in the assurance that my efforts are relevant and progressive.

This means I must to learn to curate. I’ve been usingPinterest, Ffffound and Designspiration to manage disparate libraries of inspiration for some time now and have finally decided to add my little voice and embrace Tumblr as a preferred tool to collate and share inspiration. Memette is my aggregator and this is the motivation; not to acquire, but to create.

Please take a look, i hope the contents inspire you as much as they do me.